Some of the mixes online right now are incomplete, and of course, I'll be tweaking them endlessly from now until time eternal.

At first, I thought I would be remodeling these tracks in the similar fashion I redid Restraint, but I found myself backtracking, even attempting to preserve a lot of elements in the original mixes.

The material calls for it -- the style of music on Imprint requires a more solid sense of rhythm than I can provide, so parts that I could conceivably play live, I've left to the machines. Except for the acoustic guitar parts. At some point, I'm going to have to face those.

But not on "Choices". This track was one of the last I wrote for Imprint. I vowed at first to stop writing when I reached 10 tracks, but the album felt as if it were missing something. I thought about the bass line to Sade's "Paradise", and I wanted to get that kind of feel. It ended up being "Choices".

I pretty much changed the drums and the guitar sample on this track. Nothing else was really touched from the original mix.

Listen to "Choices"

At various points in the past, I've posted audio files of a cassette tape that survived a burglary in 1998, in which I lost all my early 4-track demos. The transfer to digital was never satisfactory, mostly because I lacked the equipment and know-how to do it right.

As a result, I've always considered that lone surviving tape as something of a bastard child, and I would always wince when friends would say they listened to it. The demos are crude in the way that dated technology makes it thus, and it doesn't help matters when the sound quality is crap.

But two weeks ago, I gave the tapes another go, this time applying copious amounts of multi-band compression to clarify some parts and to mitigate others.

It definitely helped.

In fact, it's making me reconsider tracks I relegated to the dustbin. One such track is something I've given the working title of "Acid Vogue". I was trying to co-opt the drum beat of Madonna's "Vogue" into something I thought qualified for acid house. Not that I knew what acid house was -- I just knew Duran Duran was influenced by it during the Big Thing sessions.

It's more Depeche Mode than anything else. I still don't know what to do with this track. Maybe nothing at all.

Listen to "Untitled (Acid Vogue)"

It's now the holiday season of 2011, and that "Christmas card" has undergone some major revisions. Where there were samplers pretending to be guitars, there are now guitars (and basses as well.) Samplers are still posing as drummers, but the samples sound slightly more human. I've also replaced a two tracks, replacing a Japanese-language cover with an English-language cover and a piano piece with the semi-title track from 「風の歌を聴け」.

I gave this compilation the title Original Confidence as a tongue-in-cheek gesture, naming it after the Japanese version of the Billboard charts.

Have a listen, won't you? Here's a track called "Go".

Listen to "Go"

Which is strange since I seem to write so much music that requires a lot of guitar.

NUMBER GIRL was a Japanese punk band that actually inspired me to take a smattering of lessons back in 2001. I wanted to learn how to play the band's music, but I just didn't want to follow tablature blindly. And learning a few NUMBER GIRL songs made me braver in terms of writing with guitar.

「DESTRUCTION BABY」 is my favorite NUMBER GIRL song. It has only four chords, but the off-kilter drum fills and enigmatic bass line turn it into something far more complex. My version of it, though, is a mess. The playing is choppy, the rhythm a disaster -- not at all the precision work of the original.

Let's just say a lot of work went into post-production.

Listen to 「DESTRUCTION BABY」

So while I have been working on Eponymous 4 stuff, it's more on the web side than the music side. (Eponymous 4 is as much a web project as a music project.)

I did, however, go to a photo shoot for the cover of Restraint. I've also been looking at mastering options, and I've been going through more rounds of mixing. It's getting really close now. I'm not committing to a particular release date, but sometime in (early) 2012 is not an unreasonable goal.

The tracks you pretty much hear will be the ones on the final album. As such, I've also requested CD Baby take down the Work Release Program titles from all their digital partners. The Work Release Program titles will still be available through CD Baby, but I'm not going to feature them here, nor on the Observant Records web shop.

Honestly? It's kind of painful to hear those versions. I disclaimed the hell out of them when I released them back in 2009, but I didn't realize just how green they would sound to me just 1 1/2 years later. That's not to say what I have now is all that masterful, but I like the idea that I'm moving forward.

This weekend, however, I launched the scaffolding of the Observant Records web site. Not much content on there yet, but I hope to get a web shop running there in the future.

That's not to say I've totally been neglectful of musical matters. I went back to some cassette tape demos that I transferred to digital and took another shot at mastering them. The first time I tried, I did a brute force job and ended up with some terrible files. This time, I think I have something that sound decent.

As a result, some tracks I've written off as trash just might be candidates for a second look. Maybe I'll even post something here later.

For way too long, this site has given the impression that I haven't been productive. I have -- it's just a lot of the stuff in the pipeline never got around to being released and now probably never will.

At the same time, I needed a way to corral all the random items I post willy-nilly everywhere, so I opted to show the whole roadmap. I've redesigned the Music section to show all the releases forthcoming. About three of them are on the verge of getting out the door, and the rest -- well, there's a lot of proverbial ground to cover.

And when I get tired of being in the studio all weekend, I'll come here and post more about all the songs you haven't yet heard.

Somehow through it all, I managed to lay tracks on what could be considered my first new song since 2007. I'm not sure if I'm afflicted with writer's block or if I've just been distracted by real life to have done any writing in nearly five years. Maybe it's a combination of both.

I don't think this new song is something I'd put on an album. In fact, it feels very much like a b-side, and it bears too much of a resemblance to Kumuiuta-era Cocco. But I'm glad it's something new, and perhaps it might nudge me into focusing on creating instead of this endless whirlpool of mixing and remixing in which I find myself.

I'm sure this song will join that whirlpool, since I have this nagging feeling it's not completely fleshed out.

Oh, and the lyrics are mostly in Japanese. I can't guarantee that they won't sound to Japanese ears how Engrish sounds to ours. The title is transliterated as "Threnody".

Listen to 「スレノディー」

I'm not sure what the next Eponymous 4 album will be, but I have a sense a future album will be instrumental and attempt to corral all these libraries.

Just to test out all these new libraries, I threw together an untitled track. Yes, that's what it says in Japanese: "Mudai Heisei 23 Rokugatsu Itsuka", or "Untitled 06/05/2011".

The gamelan samples are put through some Western tuning to mix harmonically with the strings. I've also thrown in a brushed gong, tabla and taiko.

I don't know if this particular sound will expand into a full work, but it's a start.

Listen to 「無題平成23六月五日」

I finished the challenge, then put the resulting work off to the side while I worked on other projects.

One piece from that album -- imaginatively titled NaSoPiAlMo 2006 -- struck me as something that could be arranged for string quartet, which I did. I've had a lot of time to listen to it, and I think I prefer the quartet arrangement more than its source piano piece. In fact, I'm probably going to extract portions of that piano album to become a set of string quartet pieces. (But not an actual string quartet itself. Not in the traditional sense, at least.)

While that's going on, here's the piece that's taking me down this particular path. Yes, the title is in Japanese. Maybe I'll explain this fascination of using Japanese titles later, but translated, it means "String Quartet Pieces, Vol. 1, No. 5", and it's pronounced, "Gengaku Shijuusou Kyoku Sono Ichi No. 5"

Listen to 「弦楽四重奏曲其の一 No. 5」

One of the goals of the "Ex Machina Series" was to replace all the faked guitar parts with actual guitar parts where possible (read: if I can adequately play it), and nowhere is that more important than with acoustic guitar parts. Fake electric guitar parts can be obfuscated with mountains of effects, but faking acoustic guitar parts is harder. Reason has some excellent acoustic guitar samples, but coercing the digital audio workstation to sound human is where the true sorcery lies.

Or I could just play the damn part.

I covered The System's "Don't Disturb This Groove" back in 2008 after listening to Sam Amidon's All Is Well album and thinking that song would sound good using that kind of chamber orchestra arrangement. The acoustic guitar part I fashioned also served as a bass, with a single note on the downbeats marking the time.

Over the weekend, I re-recorded the acoustic guitar, this time just strumming in rhythm. I lost the bass note and had to add an upright bass part to compensate. The feel of the cover has changed dramatically because of those alterations. Still trying to decide if I like them, but I may stick with them just because I'm not inclined to go back to the fake guitar.

Listen to "Don't Disturb This Groove"

Propellerhead Software, the makers of Reason, announced it would let users who own Reason 5 and Record 1.5 to upgrade to Reason 6 for any price they name. It's Radiohead's In Rainbows all over again.

Reason 6 incorporates Record, so now there won't be two separate products. When the new version was first announced a few weeks back, I decided to skip it and wait for Reason 7. Since I already had Record, I didn't feel this upgrade was essential, and honestly, I don't actually use Record -- I tacked it onto my Reason 5 upgrade for an extra $20 out of curiosity.

But now the Pay What You Want option makes me inclined to upgrade. I don't know how much I'd pay, but it's not going to be for the usual upgrade price of approximately $130. Nor will I be a cheapskate and pay the minimum $1. Most of the value in the upgrade is for Reason owners who don't have Record, but for those users who do, Reason 6 seems more like a point release.

Really, the only thing I'd like to see -- which most likely won't happen -- is the addition of a solo viola instrument in the Orkester library. Short of dropping $500 on the Solo Strings library from Vienna Instruments, the solo strings in the Orkester library do the most convincing job of emulating solo strings I've encountered.

As part of an effort to study some of my favorite string quartet scores, I've programmed a few works into SONAR using the Orkester library as an instrument. Samuel Barber's lone string quartet is the source work for his famous Adagio for Strings. I can't say I was impressed by the movements that frame the Adagio, but after entering each note of those movements, it's eased up my criticism of them. At least now I can spot the sonata form.

Listen to "Samuel Barber - String Quartet: I. Allegro"

"enigmatics V" was one of those tracks that was complete enough but never really finished the way I would have liked. When I first wrote it, I didn't even have a fraction of the tools available to me now -- just the sequencer and an RCA cord to my computer. So the clavier part was really intended to be a guitar part, and that drum beat could have very well sampled Soul II Soul, if I actually had a sampler. I had also wanted that solo synth in the middle section to sound like something off of a Wayne Horvitz/The President album.

So 13 years later, I did what I set out to do. I replaced the drums with an emulated Roland 909 (thank you Battery!), replaced the clavier with guitar samples in Reason fed through Guitar Rig and passed the solo synth through a Guitar Rig distortion plug-in.

Now the track sounds closer to what I had imagined, which is different from the one that was actually released.

George Lucas has been getting a lot of flack for revising the Star Wars movies every time they get remastered for a new format. I can almost get his urge to tinker. He revised the original trilogy because the technology wasn't around to let him do what he wanted. I'm revising my tracks because I now have the right technology to do what I intended to do -- or at least closer to what I intended.

Of course, the big difference between Lucas and me is that way, way more people notice his tinkering. I can pull back the original enigmatics -- which I may do at some point -- and replace it with the revised version, and few people would notice.

Listen to "enigmatics V"

It started with Battery. I tried out a demo and liked how much better it sounded than the kits in my old KORG N364 or Reason, for that matter. When Guitar Center had a sale on Battery, I bought a full version. Cakewalk SONAR also bundled a limited version of Guitar Rig, so I experimented with that as well. By Christmas, I upgraded Guitar Rig to a full version and impulsively tacked on KONTAKT with my purchase.

Guitar Rig and Battery are at the heart of what I call the "Ex Machina Series". I'm going back and redoing all the drums on my tracks to use Battery (if it seems appropriate -- the N364 stil has some useful drum samples), and I've even tried my hand at recording guitar parts, even though I'm not much of a guitar player. Despite that lack of skill, Guitar Rig has quickly become an essential tool in my arsenal. So much so that it's eclipsed Reason, which I use now to fabricate guitar parts I know I can't play (usually arpeggios, definitely solos.)

One track that's definitely benefited from a remix is "Untold Demons", an adaptation of the first song I ever wrote. It always had the spirit of a guitar song, even though it was written on the piano. I posted an early version on Metafilter Music, but I much prefer the remix.

Listen to "Untold Demons"